Why it matters
Including videos in a sitemap helps Google discover all of a site's video content. Said at Search Central Live: video sitemaps are not critical but good to have, because Google ingests them much more often than it can process HTML pages, and they tell it which URLs to check for video instead of checking every page.
How to meet it
Add video:video entries (thumbnail, title, description, and content or player location) for each watch page, in the page sitemap or a separate video sitemap.
How to test it
The Sitemaps report reads the video sitemap, and its video count matches the Video indexing report.
How Regensbot covers it
Decided from one URL.
An audit reads the response, the headers, the HTML, robots.txt, the sitemaps and the structured data, and the finding shows the evidence it saw.
Sources
Google documents01
Claims in the knowledge base03
- D2-C556ConfirmedUsing images to your advantage and Engaging Search users with videosShown on screen
- D2-C925UndocumentedUsing images to your advantage and Engaging Search users with videosSaid on stage
- D2-C926ConsistentUsing images to your advantage and Engaging Search users with videosSaid on stage
Claim IDs refer to the Search Central Live 2026 knowledge base. The knowledge base (opens in a new tab)
- Confirmed
- Google's documentation states the same thing.
- Consistent
- Google's documentation supports it without stating it.
- Undocumented
- Said or shown at the event, not in the documentation.